ection or power of thinking; as grief is the name of the
passion in which it passes to a less."

Looking backward for the generative source of that creative power of
thought in him, from his own mysterious intellectual being to its first
cause, he still reflected, as one can but do, the enlarged pattern of
himself into the vague region of hypothesis. In this way, some, at all
events, would have explained his mental process. To him that process
was nothing less than the apprehension, the revelation, of the greatest
and most real of ideas--the true substance of all things. He, too, with
his vividly-coloured existence, with this picturesque and sensuous
world of Dutch art and Dutch reality all around that would fain have
made him the prisoner of its colours, its genial warmth, its struggle
for life, its selfish and crafty love, was but a transient perturbation
of the one absolute mind; of which, indeed, all finite things whatever,
time itself, the most durable achievements of nature and man, and all
that seems most like independent energy, are no more than petty
accidents or affections. Theorem and corollary! Thus they stood:

"There can be only one substance: (corollary) it is the greatest of
errors to think that the non-existent, the world of finite things seen
and felt, really is: (theorem): for, whatever is, is but in that:
(practical corollary): one's wisdom, therefore, consists in hastening,
so far as may be, the action of those forces which tend to the
restoration of equilibrium, the calm surface of the absolute,
untroubled mind, to tabula rasa, by the extinction in one's self of all
that is but correlative to the finite illusion--by the suppression of
ourselves."

In the loneliness which was gathering round him, and, oddly enough, as
a somewhat surprising thing, he wondered whether there were, or had
been, others possessed of like thoughts, ready to welcome any such as
his veritable compatriots. And in fact he became aware just then, in
readings difficult indeed, but which from their all-absorbing interest
seemed almost like an illicit pleasure, a sense of kinship with certain
older minds. The study of many an earlier adventurous theorist
satisfied his curiosity as the record of daring physical adventure, for
instance, might satisfy the curiosity of the healthy. It was a
tradition--a constant tradition--that daring thought of his; an echo,
or haunting recurrent voice of the human soul itself, and as such
sealed